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ORIGINALITY. 



BY 



REV. ELIAS NASON, M. A. 



** Veritas nunquam ferity 

— Seneca* 



■-■• 







28 188: 

BOSTON: 
D. LOTHROP AND COMPANY, 

32 FRANKLIN STREET. 
1882. 






Copyright, 1882. 
D. Lothrop & Company. 



AN ADDRESS, 

Delivered before the Shakespearean Club of the Massachusetts 
Agricultural College, at Amherst, June 21, 1881. 



ORIGINALITY. 



THIS world makes progress by orig- 
inality. It writes its story by the 
hand, till Faust gives it the printing-press 
to strike off pages by the million. It 
drags its merchandise through mud and 
mire, till Stevenson turns out the locomo- 
tive engine. It sends its news by some 
slow-footed messenger, till Morse extends 
the wire, annihilating distance. 

Tramp, tramp over the rocks we go, 
still moving in a circle, till some Bacon, 
Newton, Faraday, steps out of the circle, 
and tells us how to shun the rocks. Mil- 
lions march, but make no progress. They 



ORIGINALITY. 



plow, sow, reap, hew, forge, and build : it 
is the same dull story — furrow in the 
same old furrow; song on the same old 
key-note ; driving a treadmill ; grinding 
corn, like Samson, blinded. 

Then comes up a thinker, and the world 
advances by originality. Not by repetition, 
not by imitation, not by chance, nor acci- 
dent, but by originality ; and if there be 
no originality, then there is no advance- 
ment. Indeed, our civilization is but 
the aggregate, the sum-total, the repre- 
sentative of originality. 

To what do you owe the mirror be- 
fore which you tied your cravat, your 
bonnet strings, to come to this assembly ? 
Why, to the pulsation of some original 
brain, transmuting sand and soda into 
glass, as far back as the days of Nin- 
eveh. Whence the clock that told you 
when to come ? From an original thought 
of some dreamer in the eleventh century. 
Whence the bank-bill that bought the 



ORIGINALITY. 7 

clock ? From an Italian banker who in- 
vented paper currency. Whence the seat 
you sit upon ? Well, from a bright idea 
of some antediluvian, out of which there 
sprang a hand-saw ; from another, out of 
which there sprang a fore-plane ; and from 
another still, which made the combination. 
All these common things around you 
sprang — as Minerva out of the head of 
Jupiter — from originality. But if these, 
then certainly those works which indicate 
on a grander scale our progress. The 
temple of our civilization has arisen by suc- 
cessive contributions of original thought. 
It has been many centuries ascending ; 
but must you not on every column, cor- 
nice, frieze and architrave of the resplend- 
ent edifice, inscribe — 

" ORIGINALITY ? " 

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you live on 
brains — this hour, of course, excepted — 



8 ORIGINALITY. 

and those that live the latest live the 
longest. You assemble here by Grecian, 
Roman, Saxon, Celtic, Yankee brains : 
one idea materialized in a coin, another in 
a coat, another in a bonnet — decidedly 
original — another in this instrument of 
music, and another in this noble edifice. 
So, as I said, successive brains have made 
our civilization. 

Take another instance. Until the 
seventeenth century, Aristotle was the 
prime philosopher. As late as 1621, the 
Parliament of France forbade, under pain 
of death, the teaching of any but his phil- 
osophy.* 

By the syllogism Aristotle would reveal 
the secrets of the universe. "Assume a 
point," said he; "then by the syllogism 
prove it." Well, try this. Men, by Dar- 
win's theory, are well-developed monkeys. 



*En 1 62 1, ilrendit un arret de mort contre ceux qui enseign- 
eraient quelque chose de contraire a la doctrine d" 1 Aristote." 
Histoire de France, par £o?inec/iose. Tome i,/>, 487. 



ORIGINALITY. 9 

You are a man ; ergo, a well-developed 
monkey. Do you gain anything by this 
reasoning ? Why, after you have caught 
your monkey — man — a bonnet or bank- 
bill will do it — you set your syllogistic 
trap for him. Yet for centuries philoso- 
phers used no other trap. But Francis 
Bacon came, and changed all this. " Note 
the facts in the case," said he ; " find mon- 
keys coming to the plane of men, then by 
induction step to your conclusion." 

By this inductive system Newton un- 
locked the secrets of the rolling orbs 
above you. Priestley, Davy, Linnaeus and 
Galvani, the secrets of the rolling globe 
below you. By it Helmholtz, Tyndal, 
Thompson, and the other leaders in the 
kingdom of intellect, now explain the mys- 
teries of this resplendent Cosmos. 

By it your bright-eyed sister Susie, when 
she is not whispering, learns her " Parlez- 
vous-Francais " and music lesson in the 
school-room. So you see the world rolls 



10 ORIGINALITY. 

onward by originality. This is the norma 
progrediendi. 



II. 



But what is originality ? A celestial 
benison indeed ; but limited. In one 
sense, genius the most brilliant cannot 
originate. You cannot create, you cannot 
annihilate an atom of material substance. 
The wit of this whole world combined 
could not originate the tip of a nightin- 
gale's wing. You may change this sheet 
of paper in an instant over this blaze into 
carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and potassa ; 
but then the original particles remain in 
weight and shape the very same. Sir 
Humphrey Davy discovered, he did not 
create, the metallic bases. 

You cannot originate, you cannot abro- 
gate the law by which such changes are 
effected. You may decompose rock-salt, 
if you can find no better business, into 



ORIGINALITY. 11 

chlorine, sodium and oxygen ; you may 
combine and recombine the particles, but 
the law that binds them you can never 
make nor break. Manipulation you may 
vary ; but the mode of combination, that 
is, the law, is changeless. The salt that 
Julius Caesar tasted was made by the 
same law as that which seasoned your 
beefsteak for dinner to-day — if you had the 
good luck to get it ; I had not. 

Nature's mandates stand irrevocable. 

But you have power to originate 
thought? Politely, I say "Never!" 
Nothing on this line is original, unless 
it be original sin ; and some think that a 
plagiarism. You cannot originate thought, 
much less the laws of thought. 

" But did not Homer create the Iliad ? " 

No. He merely put together. He com- 
posed his glorious epic out of sieges, 
battles, heroes, gods and goddesses — some 
of them very mean ones — images and 
pictures pre-existing in his mind. Of such 



12 ORIGINALITY. 

material he made up his immortal poem, 
just as the Duke of Wellington out of a 
promiscuous throng of soldiers made up 
the grand army that shivered Bonaparte at 
Waterloo. 

" But Dante certainly created his In- 
ferno ? " 

Never. The scenes, the circles, the 
fire and brimstone were familiar to his 
wild imagination from his boyhood. Virgil, 
Lucian had descended into hell before 
him. He brought up no more than he 
took down with him. 

" But did not Shakespeare create his 
masterly ' Midsummer Night's Dream ? ' 

By no means. He just took "the dead 
heads " of history, shot through them the 
electric flashes of his wit, raised them from 
oblivion to sing and dance again, and so 
constructed that, and all the rest of his im- 
mortal dramas. He tells us how he did it. 

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, 
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven ; 



ORIGINALITY. 13 

And, as imagination bodies forth 
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen 
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing 
A local habitation and a name. 

Midsummer Nighfs Dream. Act. J, Scene I. 

"But did not a Grecian artist create that 
'statue which enchants the world,' the 
Venus dei Medici ? " 

Oh no ! He took, they say, from this fair 
girl a brow, from this a lip — what dainty 
picking! — from this a hand, from this a 
foot; and so, out of these rare materials — 
he might have found them all before me — 
he made up his grand masterpiece. 

" But did not Michael Angelo create St. 
Peter's Church at Rome?" 

He had no power to do it. He took the 
old Pantheon for the dome — the very best 
of it — some Grecian architect might have 
taken that from an Indian hovel; the 
Indian that from some inverted drinking- 
bowl; and some Egyptian potter that 
from an inverted acorn shell. 



14 ORIGINALITY. 

" But Handel must have created his 
original oratorio, the Messiah ? " 

He composed it. The musicians have 
the word : componere, compositum; " to put 
together." The tones of music, the canons 
of music, are as ancient as the morning 
stars. By the touch of genius, Handel 
brought forth the "linked sweetness long 
drawn out," from that golden fountain to 
which every one of you has free and open 
access. 

Through five curious portals germs of 
thought are ever crowding in upon your 
minds. They come as images, pictures, 
notions and ideas. You work them over 
as the painter colors; selecting, blending 
and combining, and so producing by the 
law of beauty, if you can, an Iliad, a cathe- 
drel, or an oratorio. Your brain is just 
brim full of these ideas. By thinking, you 
call forward this or that, as the magician 
from the pack his cards ; you combine, or 
separate, arrange and beautify: but create 



ORIGINALITY. 15 

an original thought from nothing, you never 
did ; you never will. Ex nihilo niliil fit. 

" In what, then, consists originality ? " 
Well, not in the act of creating, any way : 
but in making new combinations ; new 
adaptations and arrangements ; new dra- 
pery ; new coloring and new presentation. 
This holds, I think, in every art ; in every 
science, through and through. 

Archimedes, for example, made the 
demonstration of the forty-seventh propo- 
sition in geometry. The square, the tri- 
angle, the hypothenuse — the elements of 
the truth he had already. So, combining 
them anew and noting the relations, he 
hit his mark and cried " Eureka!" like a 
madman. 

His originality was in putting lines and 
angles to each other in an unexpected 
way, observing how they are related, and 
then drawing his conclusion. 

Is it not so ? 

Raphael painted "The Transfiguration 



16 ORIGINALITY. 

*■ 
of our Saviour." His originality was in 

bringing heads he met with on the Roman 

Corso into right position, and giving them 

the proper coloring. 

The ladies had from Elias Howe the 
splendid present of the sewing-machine. 
The mechanical powers, the thread, the 
needle were already in his possession. In 
his pinching poverty — it is just glorious 
to be poor, if you have the brains to go 
with it ! — he put this and that together : 
sent a needle through a bit of cloth ; made 
a loop before he brought it back again ; 
and cried in tears of joy, " Eureka,! " 

The world went one stitch forward. 

Daniel Webster was an original orator ; 
not because he coined new words or had 
new truths to enunciate, but because he 
used the old so grandly. 

Thomas Nast is an original designer ; 
not for making coals and gridirons, but for 
suspending innocent politicians over them 
so gingerly. Wouldn't you like to hang 



ORIGINALITY. 17 

there ? Then why are you so greedy for 
an office ? 

Who, then, is the originator? In the 
higher sense, God only. In a lower sense, 
the poet, artist, orator, inventor, to be 
sure : but also any one who puts two 
sticks together in a new and better way 
than known before. 

He who invented paper set the world 
along ; but he, also, who suggested that an 
envelope, a bed-quilt, or a bucket, or a 
bustle might be made of it, was acting in 
the same direction. 

Macbeth evinces grand inventive power ; 
but the mad poet's line — 

Now twilight lets her curtain down, 
And pins it with a star, 

is as original as anything in Shakespeare, 
and helps the world along ; for, " a vision 
of beauty is an eternal inheritance." 

So when one reduces several words into 
a point, as, "Telegram," for a telegraphic 



18 ORIGINALITY. 

dispatch ; " Hub of the universe," for 
what Boston thinks of itself ; " Almighty 
dollar," for what you are all tramping 
after ; or tells you how to better make a 
shoe, or lock a door, or grind a knife, or 
tie a knot, or drive a nail, or point a pin, 
is an originator, and, so far as that new 
combination goes, a civilizer of mankind. 

III. 

Now, ladies and gentlemen, it has no 
doubt occurred to you that one original 
step leads to another step ; one summit 
reached reveals another summit ; one note 
struck awakens livelier notes, and so on, 
as the old arithmetic has it, till the time 
of judgment. 

Galileo, for example, said the air had 
weight ; his pupil, Torricelli, then in- 
vented the barometer to weigh it. This 
led to the invention of the air-pump ; this 
to the discovery of the laws of fluids ; this 



ORIGINALITY. 19 

to Ferrel' s law of motion to the right, and 
so on till our signal service now foretells 
the storm or sunshine two or three days in 
advance of time. 

So a Grecian shepherd drew a string 
across a hollow box. He struck it with a 
stick, and listened to the tone it gave. 
A Roman thinker made a better box, 
added another string, and called the in- 
strument a cithara. A Spaniard changed 
it to a guitar ; a Frenchman to a spinet ; 
an Italian to a harpsichord ; then a Ger- 
man to a piano ; then a Yankee to a grand 
piano. What comes next ? 

Take another instance. Playing with 
amber, which he called electron, Plato saw, 
one day, that little bits of iron clung to it. 
A trivial thing, yet one step forward. 
This power Gioja used in 1260 to guide a 
ship across the Mediterranean Sea. In 
1746 a thinker in the town of Leyden 
found that he could bottle it up like whis- 
key ; and one will knock your brains out 



20 ORIGINALITY. 

just about as quick as the other. Six 
years later Franklin, by the combination 
of a kite-string and a key, showed its 
identity with the gleaming thunder-bolt ; 
Morse made it a courier for your thought 
across the continent ; Field, across the 
sea. 

And there was no more sea ! — Rev. 21:1. 

IV. 

Since, then, one original combination 
leads to other combinations ; since think- 
ers, from the earliest times, have been 
making them and recording them ; and 
since our civilization is but the result of 
them, it follows that the world has ever 
been achieving progress, and that every 
successive age has had more " vantage 
ground " than that preceding it. 

As yon majestic river now rolls gently 
through the fertile plains, now rushes 
through the mountain gorges, now disap- 



ORIGINALITY. 21 

pears, now flashes into sight again, yet 
swift or slow, tends ever towards the 
ocean, so the tide of civilization, the re- 
sultant of originality, has been, whether 
seen or unseen, slow or rapid, ever bearing 
towards perfection. As Mr. Whittier has 
well said: 

And step by step, since time began, 
We see the steady gain of man. 

Egypt received the wisdom of Phenicia 
and augmented it. Greece took what 
Egypt knew, sped along the line of art, 
and passed her learning over to the 
Romans, who enriched it by their civil 
polity. 

Did the light of genius then expire 
beneath the battle-axe of Goth and 
Vandal ? 

No. Boethius wrote his sweet Conso- 
lation of Philosophy, St. Ausgustine his 
trumpet-tongued City of God, while Ossian, 
far away in Erin, sang his melancholy 



22 ORIGINALITY. 

song. Some dreamer, then, in Germany 
gave the world a saw-mill. It might have 
been better for it at that period than the 
song. 

Haroun-al-Raschid in the East, Charle- 
magne in the West, had each the world's 
old wisdom, and increased it. 

But was there anything achieved in the 
so-called " dark ages ? " 

Yes, indeed ; original brains were work- 
ing, sparks were flying, and the world was 
moving. 

" In the revolution of ten centuries," 
says Gibbon, " not a single discovery was 
made to exalt the dignity or promote the 
happiness of mankind." 

It is an abominable lie ! Ferocity, 
bigotry, I know there was : enough of it ; 
and some of it came down to Gibbon. 

No discovery ! 

Why, from those " dark ages," reaching, 
as Henry Hallam says, from a. d. 500 to 
a. d. 1500, came the use of clocks, cotton 



ORIGINALITY. 23 

paper, gunpowder, the spinning-wheel and 
the mariner's compass. From those " dark 
ages " came the Arabian Nights you love 
so well to read ; Jerusalem, the Golden, of St. 
Bernard ; the legends from which Chaucer 
framed his Fairie Tales ; Shakespeare, 
some of his immortal dramas, and Dante 
his angel-voiced Beatrice. From those 
" dark ages " came the grand Gothic style 
of architecture ; the world-renowned Oxford 
University ; the Arabic numerals by which 
you count your greenbacks ; the bank 
where you deposit them. From those 
" dark ages " came the splendid science of 
algebra ; the musical gamut, do, re, mi ; the 
church organ and the church-going bell. 
From those " dark ages " sprang the 
symbols of chemistry and that grand idea, 
re-advanced by Faraday, that all the me- 
tallic bases, gold, silver, iron, tin, zinc, etc., 
are themselves compound, and that the 
simple elements which make up this stu- 
pendous universe are only three ! 



24 ORIGINALITY. 

It is the habit of historians to decry the 
mediaeval period. 

Assuming what is false, they use the 
syllogism : 

" Men make no progress in darkness. 
Darkness overspread that period, ergo, no 
progress." Why, ladies and gentlemen, 
the printing-press came out of those " dark 
ages," and Columbus gained his first idea 
of another continent from the dark-age 
navigators. 

By originality this world, from the start, 
has, age by age, been developing its re- 
sources and adding pearl after pearl to the 
diadem of its wisdom. Its movement has 
been sometimes like a spiral — slower, 
sometimes quicker; sometimes artistic, 
sometimes philosophic ; but this or that 
way, ever onward, upward, from a lower 
to a higher plane. 

The past golden age is, therefore, but a 
mere poetic fiction — the Arcadian felicity ; 
but an idle dreamer's dream. That the 



ORIGINALITY. 25 

ancients had the best of life, or art, or 
learning, is a sheer illusion. 

Mr. Wendell Phillips gives us a lament- 
able story of the "Lost Arts," as if the 
world were, under some points, retrogress- 
ing. Well, accepting even the fibs of the 
old historians, the lost arts do not amount 
to much. The ancients never had many 
arts to lose. 

Suppose they did make glass — anneal 
it. They had not the wit to use it for a 
mirror, or to light to any extent their 
houses by it. We now spin it into threads 
as fine and flexible as gossamer, and weave 
it into shawls and dresses, glittering with 
all the colors of the rainbow. 

Suppose, as Mr. Phillips says, they had 
the microscope, the telescope. They made 
no useful revelations by them. 

Suppose they could embalm dead bodies. 
But of what utility ? What is a dead body 
good for ? 

Pliny says : " I have seen a chariot and 



26 ORIGINALITY. 

two horses that could be hid under the 
wing of a house-fly." Well, Pliny told 
great stories ; but admit it. What is the 
use of such a bauble ? 

Suppose Rawlinson did find a mathemat- 
ical treatise on a brick at Nineveh ; of 
what value is it ? Why, there is more of 
mathematics on one page your brother 
John studies in school to-day, than has 
come out of all the exhumed cities of the 
Orient. 

Allow the Tyrian purple — which was 
scarlet — to have been lost. I am glad it is 
lost. No lady here would be willing to 
appear in it. W T e have a hundred aniline 
dyes more brilliant. 

What if the Roman dentist could plug 
teeth with gold ? We can extract and 
then put in whole sets of them while you 
are dreaming of the one you love best. 

I know we cannot make a Damascus 
blade. But how long would Caesar wink 
before a seven-shooter? 



ORIGINALITY. 27 

Suppose they did construct substantial 
works of masonry. The Cloaca maxima 
attests it. But what, think you, would a 
Roman engineer have said of putting a 
seven-mile bore, entirely through an Alpine 
barrier of solid rock, and of taking Pom- 
pey's legions through it beneath the ava- 
lanche, from flank to flank, as quick as he 
could swallow a dish of Lucrine oysters ? 

What if the Egyptians did construct a 
steamboat ? There is not a particle of evi- 
dence that they ever put steam into it. 
As to their having railways, who believes 
it? 

Mr. Phillips desires the press not to 
report his lecture, and you see the reason. 
I am willing to have mine printed. 

There were more of the marvels of art 
displayed at our late Centennial Exhibition 
than in the ancient world for twenty cen- 
turies. 

I grant that the Greeks and Romans 
manifested genius in eloquence, poetry, 



28 ORIGINALITY. 

sculpture, architecture, though not much in 
music, or in painting ; but in all those arts 
which make our homes happy and our 
nation glorious, they were twenty hundred 
years behind us. 

For one, I think their aesthetical produc- 
tions vastly overestimated. Our fathers 
lauded them ; we reecho the laudation. 

The periods of Demosthenes yield in 
Titanic force to the double-compact sen- 
tences of Daniel Webster. Mr. Phillips 
himself has sometimes spoken more 
eloquently than Cicero. Homer never 
rises to the sublimity of John Milton. 

"A good reader," says Mr. Emerson, 
" may nestle into Plato's brain ; beyond 
the horizon of Shakespeare, I cannot go." 

Try the Antigone of Sophocles, the finest 
of the Grecian tragedies, on the stage of 
the Boston Theatre to-morrow night ; 
then try Hamlet. You will see where the 
dramatic power is, and where the people 
are. 



ORIGINALITY. 29 

There is no ancient melody of the sea so 
musical as — 

Rocked in the cradle of the deep, 
I lay me down in peace to sleep, 

by Mrs. Emma Willard. 

There is nothing, Greek or Latin, so 
weird and fanciful as Edgar Allan Poe's 
Song of the Raven : — 

Once, upon a midnight dreary, 
As I pondered, weak and weary. 

There is no old poem so grandly imita- 
tive as Tennyson's Bell Song, where you 
so distinctly hear the swing of the iron 
tongue, knocking out the hours of the 
night : — 

Ring in the valiant man and free ! 
The larger heart, the kindlier hand ; 
Ring out the darkness from the land ; 
Ring in the Christ that is to be ! 



30 ORIGINALITY. 

No martial strains can be found in the 
whole range of ancient poetry, which has 
the clarion peal of that upon the shaft at 
Gettysburg : — 

On Fame 's eternal camping-ground 

Their silent tents are spread ; 
And Glory guards, with solemn round, 

The bivouac of the dead. 

No eulogy of olclen times ever equalled 
that pronounced by Abraham Lincoln at 
the raising of that shaft. 

No Greek or Roman artist ever made 
the canvas speak like Raphael ; no singer 
ever sang like Mendelssohn. 

Our English literature enshrines the 
civilization of the Old World and the 
New ; but the New World is the song 
world, the Christ world, the wonder world, 
the wide-awake world, and Amherst is a 
part of it. Are you not glad you are in it ? 
Well, do not abuse it ! 

But as to the industrial arts, the Greeks 



ORIGINALITY. 81 

and Romans stand, in spite of Mr. Phillips' 
eloquence, as little children, in the pres- 
ence of the age we live in. 

Look at printing. Messrs. Rand & 
Avery can strike off with their fifty 
presses three hundred thousand pages 
in a day. It would have taken a Roman 
scribe ten thousand days to write as much, 
and then it might have puzzled you to read 
it. But Messrs. Rand & Avery are now 
outdone. Types are now set by steam, 
and by the solar process, copies struck off 
as fast as the sun can shine. 

Look at the textile fabrics. Tell me 
how many Roman matrons, with the dis- 
taff in hand, it would take to match the 
spinning jennies of Lowell. 

Look at navigation. Who would care 
to step from the stately Cunarder, with 
its splendid drawing-rooms and rapid 
speed, into the rickety cock-boat that car- 
ried Caesar ? 

Look at house-building. Mr. Phillips 



32 ORIGINALITY. 

speaks of the house of Tiberius Caesar on 
the Palatine Hill at Rome. I have visited 
it many times ; have dropped pebble-stones 
into the well to test its depth ; and there 
is not a gentleman here that would take 
that house as a gift for his wife to live in, 
unless he wanted to be a widower; and it 
would not take long for that. 

I studied well the ruins of Pompeii 
buried by an eruption of Vesuvius, a. d. 
79, and saw something of civilization as it 
was in the days of Pliny. Though the 
remains are wonderful, I saw nothing that 
would give a modern mechanic any new 
idea. With all their "lost arts" and their 
known arts, those old pagans had no word 
for "comfort;" and we live, ladies and 
gentlemen, if we live as we ought to live, 
as much in one day as they did in fifty. 

Why, just suppose some lady here 
spending a day or two at Rome with me, 
when Rome was in its glory. 

I would like one that can walk fast, talk 



ORIGINALITY. 33 

fast, tell an acanthus from a periwinkle, 
and with a temper as sweet as mine is sour. 

Now please consider, my dear madam, 
how you would enjoy the visit. Roll up the 
curtain of two thousand years ! We are 
in the home of Cicero — for the sake of 
Wellesley College, I will call it Kikero — 
on the Palatine Hill. 

There opposite, you see the Capitol ; 
below, the forum, very beautiful ; there, 
the circus ; there, the Tarpeian Rock, 
where you may kill yourself when you get 
tired of me. 

Now let us look at the situation. 

On rising in the morning, your little feet 
rest on cold marble slabs; carpets are 
something yet to come. No stockings 
cover your tender feet ; these articles are 
not sold in Rome : they are modern com- 
forts. The forgeries of Chatterton were 
detected by the verse — 

She said, as her white hands white hosen were knitting, 
" What pleasure it is to be married ! " 



34 OBIGINALITY. 

which he made Rowley put into his tragedy 
of Ella, feigned to have been written 
before hosen were invented. Well, not a 
pin is to be found in all the house to fasten 
your dress together. Pins came later. 

No glass windows admit the light upon 
your beauty ; no glass mirrors reflect it 
to yourself. There is no chimney, even, 
to conduct the smoke away. This is to try 
your temper. Well, come to breakfast. 
What, no tea, no coffee, no sugar ? No ; 
these luxuries are unknown. But Cicero 
lives well. Here is venison. Where are 
the knives and forks to take it with? 
Forks! The Romans never saw one. 
Cicero holds the only knife at the table 
and cuts, you see, the meat in pieces just 
to suit the mouth of the recipient. So 
your little mouth, I regret to see, gets but 
a scanty breakfast. You take these raw 
oysters with your delicate fingers. How 
delicious ! 

Do you decide to stay ? Well, spinning 



.ORIGINALITY. 35 

wool upon a distaff with the orator's 
daughter Julia, is your employment. All 
pretty enough in poetry. But look around 
the house. There is no lounge or sofa to 
relieve your weariness ; no rocking-chair to 
woo you into slumber. No watch or clock 
to tell you the time for dinner ; no magazine 
to amuse your fancy after it; no photo- 
graphs to recall your loved ones ; no stere- 
opticon to bring the distant world before 
you. 

But you are musical. Hark! Instead 
of Chickering's grand piano you hear an 
old cithara, something like a banjo, strik- 
ing out tunes rough enough to set your 
teeth on edge. 

Oh, the lost arts ! You are alive to-day 
because they are lost. 

Well, look a moment into the grand 
orator's library. Not a single printed 
book! Just see them! Piles on piles of 
rolls, tied up like music-holders. Open 
one of them. It is a hundred feet in 



36 ORIGINALITY. 

length and commences : — Qiwusque tandem 
abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra ? 

But perhaps you would now like to indite 
a letter to your lover. Then sit down 
upon that tripod, take the orator's pen — a 
stick of wood. He calls it a stylus — 
take that bit of sheepskin; write. What 
gracious sentences ! Now tie your precious 
letter up with another bit of sheepskin. 
Seal it. Will you send it by the mail ? 
There is no mail. Servetus, Cicero's 
slave, will take it to its destination; and 
then, ah me! You wait so long for a 
responsive bit of sheepskin, unless your 
lover chance to come himself, and then 
you have, for aught I know, a sheep's 
head! Yes, my dear madam, on the 
Palatine Hill, in the home of the noblest 
of the Roman orators — a rose-bush now 
marks the spot — you would move through 
marble halls, and have nude sculptured 
forms enough around you ; but ere a single 
day had passed, you would be glad to 



ORIGINALITY. 37 

exchange a Parian goddess for a good pair 
of worsted stockings, and your song would 
be: — 

'Mid pleasures and palaces, though we may roam, 
Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home. 

Grandeur, sumptuosity, those magnates 
of that era had; but those ten thousand 
articles and arrangements which make the 
wheels of modern life turn as on golden 
axles, they never saw. For why ? Because 
the world advances slowly, steadily, by 
originality. It then had come up to a cer- 
tain point ; no more. The level was two 
thousand years below us. The "lost arts" 
were there. 

But thinkers kept on thinking. Every 
successive age contributed something — 
this a windmill, this a penknife, this a com- 
pass, this a printing-press, this a paper- 
mill, this a water-pump, this a power-loom, 
this a locomotive engine, this an ocean tel- 
egraph, this a telephone, this an electric 



38 ORIGINALITY. 

light — to the general stock. We are now 
rejoicing in this accumulated brain-work, 
the "lost arts" to the contrary, notwith- 
standing. 



V. 



But have we attained perfection? No; 
not in any way. Some hundred years to 
come it will be said of us, "They were 
barbarians!" Something has been done; 
but we have as yet hardly entered the 
outer vestibule of the sanctuary of science. 

To say nothing of the unresolved 
problems of the stellar system, of the origin 
of the species, of the secret of force, of the 
constitution of the elements of matter, or 
of the mechanism of the mind, over which 
things many brains are aching, there are 
myriads of questions to be settled, notions 
to be exploded, inventions to be made, arts 
to be set forward, principles to be eluci- 
dated, and victories to be won. 



ORIGINALITY. 39 

Take medicine. Physicians enough ; 
but which of them can tell you why this 
man dies of a cancer, this of a con- 
sumption ; or knows if his prescription 
is to kill or cure you ? 

Take law. What is it, far too often, but 
a net to take the little rogues in and let 
the great rogues out ? 

Take theology. Can you count the 
roads it lays open into heaven ? 

Take music. Have we drawn but a 
single cupful from the brimming ocean ? 
Is not something grander than the strains 
of Handel yet to entrance the world ? 

Take the woman question. Can any- 
body tell what is to be done with her ? 

Take costume. Is that lady who visited 
old Rome with me quite satisfied with her 
"love of a bonnet," her pannier and her 
high-heeled boots ? 

Perfection ! 

We have done but just enough to show 
us what is to be done. Why, the time is 



40 ORIGINALITY. 

not far distant when the education we now 
pursue will be but "a scholastic curiosity ;" 
the sermons we now preach will be as dead 
as door nails ; the literature we now laud, 
the pabulum of some mousing antiquary ; 
the costume we now use — dare you think 
what will be said of it ? 

If at some old folks' concert in those 
coming days, the ladies should appear in 
our present style, with the curls, the 
crimpings, the flounces and the furbelows, 
the cry would break from every tongue: 

"Well, there were 'fixings' in those 
days ; there were ' surroundings ; [ but 
where was the woman of the period!" 

But there has been marching in double- 
quick time during the last half century. 
Invention and improvement have with 
magical rapidity followed invention and 
improvement, so that a new order of 
things, a new style of life has come ; and 
thus advancing, must not the world soon 
have its heat from the hydrogen and 



ORIGINALITY. 41 

oxygen of the ocean; its light from elec- 
tricity, its motive power from the atmos- 
phere, its thought made visible as it is 
engendered, and its communication be- 
tween all the people instantaneous ? 

Must not man's dominion over nature 
soon come to be a royal dominion, and he 
himself rise to be, not just a little higher 
than the apes, but just a little lower than 
the angels ? 

I hear grand trumpet-tones now break- 
ing over the hill-tops and proclaiming this; 
I see bright evangel faces beaming from 
the clear blue sky and beckoning onwards. 



VI. 



But how are we to rise? I answer, 
By originality. By making new and better 
combinations and arrangements. 

But what is the secret of originality? 
Well, first, there must be aspiration. This 
comes from inspiration, which is from 



42 ORIGINALITY. 

above : as when ten thousand tongues 
and instruments were pealing forth the 
grandest strains of his Creation, Haydn 
rose, and pointing upward, said : 

"It comes from there ! " 

How, then? By thinking. " By patient 
thought," said Newton. By earnest 
thinking. It is this that brings the Apollo 
Belvedere from the block of marble. It is 
this that sends the locomotive engine thun- 
dering on its conquering way. It is this 
that puts the nitro-glycerine through the 
backbone of the mountain. Original men 
are intense thinkers. Newton was so 
smitten with " the wild delight of think- 
ing" that he once took the tip of the fore- 
finger of his lady-love to put out the fire in 
his tobacco pipe. "The brute ! " you say; 
but he was bringing brutum fnlmen from 
the heavens. 

Byron used to sit whole nights in the 
shrouds of the ship, rapt in the brilliant 
creations of his own genius. Webster 



ORIGINALITY. 43 

sometimes thought so intensely over his 
grand arguments that his brow became as 
cold as marble. Neither a Macbeth nor a 
barometer comes by accident. Millions 
had played with soap-bubbles; Newton 
mixed in a little brain with them, and so 
came out the germ of those wonderful dis- 
coveries that enable you to detect the 
metallic elements of the sun to-day. 

It was because Galvani had been study- 
ing electron that he saw in the twitching of 
the dead frog's leg the science that couples 
the nations by the telegraph. "By intense 
study, revising and re-revising," said Mr. 
Whittier to me, " I wrote Barbara 
Frietchie." "I had the fever a long time 
burning in my own brain," said Mr. Long- 
fellow, "ere I let my hero take it. 
Evangeline is so easy for you to read, 
because it was so hard for me to write." 
The battery must be charged before the 
sparks will fly. The apple strikes your 
head in vain, unless your thought grasps 



44 ORIGINALITY. 

hold of it, and makes it tell the story of 
terrestrial gravitation. Thinking, then, is 
the second point; what next? I answer, 
Independent thinking. This is so rare 
that you call an ordinary man attempting 
it, original. Most men are mere copyists 
of other men's copy, copied a thousand 
times before. You see that I am one of 
them. All I claim is being an honest thief. 

" What does my minister believe? Tell 
me; then I'll say what I believe." 

"Did Addison spell phthisic with a ph 
andath?" Yes. "Then I will spell it so." 

"Does Mr. Darwin think my great 
grandfather was a baboon ? " Yes. "Then 
I am of the same opinion." 

Perhaps your neighbors are. 

"Does Queen Victoria wear a pound of 
powdered jute upon her head?" Yes. 
"Then fix up mine." 

" Does Mr. Phillips say the Roman 
dandy drank his sherry-cobbler ? " To be 
sure he does. "Then let me have a straw." 



ORIGINALITY. 45 

"Does Simon say, this way?" Yes. 
"Then this way." "Does Simon say, 
that way?" Yes. "Then that way." 
"Does Simon say, wig-wag?" Yes. 
"Then wig- wag." 

Imitation instead of aspiration ; hence 
no progress. To make it, we must dare to 
let our own thoughts come up to the front, 
and stand to them. 

But our thoughts must run along the 
line of our vocation. Whatever that may 
be, there is ever a splendid unopened room 
in front of us. You are most likely to 
come into it by holding to the bent of your 
genius; for you then strike with an eye 
quickened by love ; with a hand that 
comes down true to the mark, by practice. 
The linnet must not attempt to build an 
oriole's nest. 

Your guide is Nature. The closer 
you cling to this, the more original; for, 
as I said, God only can create, and Nature 
only is the masterpiece of originality. To 



46 ORIGINALITY. 

the practiced eye, this universe is just like 
some grand transparency through which 
the thoughts of God are gleaming. A 
bird is a materialized conception of the 
Deity; a bird-song is an idea of his in 
music ; a cloud, in color. Now it may not 
be that every bird is beautiful, or every 
song of bird melodious ; still there is a type 
of beauty, there is a grand harmonic 
key-note running through and through this 
magnificent scheme of things, on which 
every form is molded, every tone of music 
modulated. The closer you bring your 
eye to this type of beauty, your ear to this 
leading note of the accordance, the more 
do you become original. Art springs from 
Nature. From the acanthus came the 
Corinthian capital; from the interblending 
branches of a German forest, the Gothic 
style of architecture. But the hand that 
drew the matchless capital from the curl- 
ing vine, the mitred window from the 
pendent branches, had its training under 



ORIGINALITY. 47 

sharp aesthetic law, and in obedience to the 
eternal type of beauty. 

Not, then, the mere copyist of nature, 
but the copyist under the line of God's 
own thought, and in accordance with the 
underlying and eternal type of beauty, is 
the originator. 

The immortal works of Homer, Virgil, 
Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, Raphael, 
Michael Angelo, Handel, Haydn, Goethe, 
Scott and Byron, glow with such concep- 
tions. Here is an instance. I stood some 
time ago at the beautiful villa of Diodati, 
on the eastern margin of Lake Leman, 
near Geneva, where the last-named poet 
wrote, in the summer of 1816, the third 
book of his Childe Harold. On my right 
hand rose the stupendous pinnacles of the 
Alps, old Mont Blanc heaving its icy head, 
giant like, above them all. The long black 
line of the Jura stretched as far as my eye 
could run upon the left. The lake was 
sleeping at my feet. 



48 ORIGINALITY. 

But now upon the north portentous 
thunder-heads came rolling up over the 
face of the blue sky, casting sombre shad- 
ows on the waters, and brooding, as some 
vast funereal canopy, over the broad valley. 
But see ! a flash, a peal, a crash, as from 
columbiads on a battle-field ! The clouds 
are all ablaze ; the lake is foaming and the 
floods are pouring down in torrents. I 
have not words to paint the scene. But 
why attempt it ? since the hand of genius, 
on this very spot, as if under inspiration, 
wrote : 

O night and storm 
And darkness, ye are wond'rous strong ; 
Yet lovely in your strength, as is the light 
Of a dark eye in woman ! Far along 
From peak to peak, the rattling crags among 
Leaps the live thunder. Not from one lone cloud ; 
But every mountain now hath found a tongue ; 
And Jura answers from her misty shroud, 
Back to the joyous Alps that call to her aloud. 

— Childe Harold, Canto III. 

The mountains talking to each other in 



ORIGINALITY. 43 

tones of thunder, their heads gleaming in 
the quick cross-lightnings ! Original, be- 
cause the grandeur of the scene is grasped. 
The Alpine echoes are the voices of celes- 
tial spirits ; and the whole comes to our 
imagination under the eternal type of 
Beauty. 

So the grand idea that the principles of 
harmony pervade the universe; that the 
deep-tone ocean sends forth sprays of 
music all around us and above us to reveal 
the nearness and the goodness of our God; 
the grand idea that the golden orbs of 
light in rolling through their crystal 
groves sing songs as they course on, to 
draw our thoughts to the unseen domin- 
ions, the Greek and Roman poets had: 
and yet they did not well express it.* It 
remained for the immortal Shakespeare, 
God-beloved, over whom the wings of 
angels quivered — princely poet of the ages 
— to touch the key-note of celestial beauty; 

* See Somniam Scipionis, sections 1 1 and 12. 



50 ORIGINALITY. 

to Christianize the thought and make 
heaven and earth clasp hands in music. 
He says, the Greek idea in his mind : 

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank ! 
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music 
Creep in our ears ; soft stillness and the night 
Become the touches of sweet harmony. 
Sit, Jessica ! Look, how the floor of heaven 
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold ! 
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st, 
But in his motion, like an angel sings. 
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims: 
Such harmony is in immortal souls. 
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay 
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it. 

— Merchant of Venice, Act V, sc. i. 

But when the vesture breaks, we shall 
hear it. Thus he throws hope's sparkling 
rainbow over life and interblends with all 
the notes of earth's and heaven's harmonies, 
sweetly cheering us as we pass through the 
vales of sadness to the hills of glory. So 
is he the God-sent poet of hope, of aspira- 
tion, and of manliness. 



ORIGINALITY. 51 

VII. 

Though it may be given to but few to 
rise to such originality, I think it is in the 
power of each and every one of us, on the 
line of our vocation, to take some step 
from the known into the unknown ; to 
touch some spring no other hand has 
touched; to make some original combina- 
tion, and thus advance the civilization of 
mankind. Every little step into that un- 
discovered realm where thinkers dare to 
peer, maybe a giant's step, leading, as that 
of Stevensons, unnumbered millions into 
new possession. Just the notion of a 
postal card,* a paper bag, a friction match, f 
a seamless sock makes this world swing on 
a little easier. 



* Dr. Stephaw, a German, invented the postal card, and 
Austria first adopted it. About seventy countries now use it, 
and the United States about 250,000,000 annually. 

f The brimstone match had long been in use. Mr. Holden first 
applied phosphorus to the end of a stick, but ignition of the 
wood did not follow. The happy thought then struck him that 
he would first coat the end of the stick with brimstone, then 
apply the phosphorus, and the friction match was invented. 



52 OBIGIJVALITY. 

By original combinations, made in 
closet, cabinet and field, the freedom of 
our nation is effected. The star of peace 
now shines serenely over the most magnifi- 
cent country on the globe. Soon we shall 
see a higher, nobler, manlier style of life. 
There are coming grander inventions, 
sweeter strains of music, mightier sweeps 
of vision. Thinkers of the present day are 
rising from the Procrustean bed of error, 
snapping the bands of mediaeval cant and 
priestly domination, and coming more and 
more into the light of experimental science 
and consistent faith. 

What marvelous developments as to the 
industrial and aesthetic arts; what new 
ideas concerning education, property, God, 
and final destiny ! What brotherly love, 
what charity, what friendliness, what 
breaking down of denominational palisades, 
what uplifting of the millions, if we do 
our duty, this new century of our gov- 
ernment shall see, it has not entered 



ORIGINALITY. 53 

into the boldest imagination to conceive. 

Why should one man have an education 
and his brother pine away in ignorance ? 
Why should one man occupy a mansion 
and his brother want a home to shield his 
cowering family from the pinching cold? 
Why should one man sip the ruby wine of 
lazy life, his brother drain the cup of mis- 
ery to the dregs ? These things must and 
will be rectified. Nature is inexhaustible. 
There is enough in it for all God's children. 
Men are coming more and more to see this, 
and by invention after invention to unroll 
the treasures. Hence the "golden age" 
is not, as Mr. Phillips intimates, three 
thousand years gone by, but, if we stand to 
duty, just ahead of us. We come to it 
under the celestial guidance, by originality. 

Every one of you, ladies and gentlemen, 
may, if you will, become original. It is 
done, as I have said, by thinking patiently, 
independently, naturally, and aspiring to 
make this world a better place to live in, 



54 ORIGINALITY. 

and its people better worthy of the 
place. 

The want for this is not ability, but 
interest. 

"Your horse don't go," said a stranger 
to a boy whom he saw trying to urge his 
lazy pacer round an old cider-mill; "what 
ails him ? " 

"Nothing ails him," replied the boy, 
hurling a stone at him to start him for- 
ward. 

" But he don't go now," continued the 
man ; "what's the matter with him? " 

"Nothing's the matter with him," re- 
turned the boy ; " he ain't interested in the 
business." 

Well, this is the reason why the ponder- 
ous crank of civilization turns so slowly. 
We are not interested in the business. 
Still, it is encouraging to see that every 
little effort in the right direction helps the 
movement, and that the world does not go 
back upon itself. Even the invention of a 



ORIGINALITY. 55 

better way to light a fire, or lock a door, or 
check your horse, or check your temper; to 
warm your fingers, or to warm your heart, 
may help to set the world along. 

" But what," some one may ask, "can I 

do?" 

As a farmer, you may, like Mr. Bull of 
Concord, give us a better grape, or tell us 
how to utilize ammonia, or how to kill the 
Colorado beetle, or how to keep the boys 
from sherry-cobblers. 

As a mechanic, you may tell us how to 
drive an engine with less fuel and less fric- 
tion. As a physician, you may bury some 
of your old drugs with the " lost arts," and 
give the sick a little better chance to live 
and liquidate the claims you have against 
them. As a teacher, you may find some 
better thing than birch to wake up the 
genius of that noisy boy in the corner. As 
a minister, you may put a little more pep- 
per and salt into your sermons. As a lady, 
you may write, like Mrs. Brown, a vesper 



56 ORIGINALITY. 

hymn to keep the children still, or teach 
your liege lord to tie your bonnet-strings 
more tenderly. That would be one knot 
gained. 

During the year just past, the ladies of 
this country took out no less than seventy 
patents for inventions. One was for " a 
holder for pillow shams." I never could 
tell what to do with them. Another was a 
" fish-boner," to save their husbands from 
being choked to death ; and now, if they 
can invent a machine to keep them at 
home at night and make them go to church 
on Sundays, the world will move more easily. 

The invention for you yourself to make, 
lies just in front of you. Too many search 
afar for the spectacles, when all the while 
they rest upon the nose.* 



* For many centuries the paper-makers formed every individ- 
ual sheet, however small, of the exact size ordered, bestowing 
as much labor on a small sheet as a large one, when some per- 
son happened to say : " Why not make all sheets large, and 
then divide them into sizes wanted, and save ten times the 
labor?" The spectacles were on the nose, and yet it took at 
least eight centuries to discover them. 



0B1GINALITY. 57 

This world on which you tread is brim- 
ming full of undiscovered wonders. 

" I could find enough," said Agassiz, 
" on the shore of Wenham Pond to busy 
me for the remainder of my life." 

There is gold in the quartz beside your 
door, and silver in the soil you cultivate. 
The air you breathe is laden with electric 
riches, and caloric is a magazine of power 
and splendor. 

Then analyze the pebble-stone; note 
the action of the acid on the alkali; see 
how nature makes a fern-leaf ; name it. 
Look into the energy of protoplasm ; set to 
music some sweet bird-song; pass a kind 
word over to the weary, and your bank-bill 
over to the needy, and you are helping this 
bright world to develop its resources and 
swing forward. 

So Humphrey, Hitchcock, Perkins, and 
other kindred spirits, in this beautiful 
town fifty years ago — nor have I till 
to-day since seen it — were endeavoring to 



58 ORIGINALITY. 

do, and the result is seen, not only in these 
noble institutions, stately mansions and 
intelligent society, but also in the educa- 
tional progress of the State, the country, 
and the world. 

A little spring had lost its way 

Amid the grass and fern ; 
A passing stranger scooped a well, 

Where weary man might turn. 

He walled it in and hung, with care, 

A ladle at the brink ; 
He thought not of the deed he did, 

But judged that toil might drink. 

He passed again, and lo ! the well, 

By summers never dried, 
Had cooled ten thousand parching tongues, 

And saved a life beside. 



A dreamer dropped a random thought, 
'Twas old, and yet 'twas new ; 

A simple fancy of the brain ; 
Yet strong in being true. 



ORIGINALITY. 59 

It shone upon a genial mind, 

And lo ! its light became 
A lamp of life, a beacon-ray, 

A monitory flame. 

The thought was small, the issue great, 

A watch-fire on the hill ; 
It sheds its radiance far adown, 

And cheers the valley still. 

— Charles Mackay. 

Such a watch-fire every one of us may set ; 
and for such service every one of us was 
sent into this world. 

But does any one of you still say to me, 
"I have, sir, no originality?" My reply 
is, " You can be good; and that is being 
splendidly original." 



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Helpful Thoughts for Young Men. i2mo, $1.25. 

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o 

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T. D. Wolsey, D.D., LL. D. 

Helpful Thoughts for Young Men. i2mo, $1.25. 

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o 

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